Chuwi Announces The HiGame Mini-PC With Kaby Lake G

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• PeachNCream - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link

  Chuwi is doing good things to disrupt the PC industry. I'm glad to see desktops on the horizon with Kaby-G since Intel's latest NUC needs some competition. Too bad about the 8GB of RAM though. It'd be a fantastic deal at that the $1k price point with 16GB.

• Samus - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link

  It is surprising how good their products are. I have a dual-booting Android\Windows 10 tablet I picked up for $90. It's astonishingly good for the price. The 32GB eMMC is tolerable since their is a PCIe-based SDHC expansion slot I have a 128GB U3 card in, and 2GB RAM gets it by. But the real story is the build quality is shockingly good for something that cost less than $100, and it has been reliable and the Android distribution (4.4) actually got an update out of the box AND CONTINUES to get updates from Chuwi servers. I received an update to Android 7.1 about 6 months ago, not a huge delay in distribution when all things are considered.
  
  Granted, supporting Android x86 is easy because it only needs to be optimized to run on one architecture (Atom\Baytrail) unlike Android ARM where it needs to be optimized for hundreds of SoC's with dozens of different GPU's, modems, etc. But Chuwi has no incentive to continue supporting a 2 year old tablet that honestly isn't making them much money.
  
  I wish some 1st tier companies like *SAMSUNG* would take a queue from these Chinese underdogs and actually support their products through their useful lifetime.

• sprockkets - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link

  Which model? I never thought they would have updated the android side ever.

• sprockkets - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link

  Also even though it is x86 it still needs quite a bit of work to get it to work with full hardware support.

• JoeyJoJo123 - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link

  I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised at the price point. It'd be interesting if boxes like this came down in price significantly (~$600) to where it could be considered an entry-level, mostly non-upgradable PC (can't swap out CPU+GPU, memory upgrades only benefitting heavy multitaskers, and storage upgrades limited to smaller form factors).
  
  At $600 it'd be a really competitive buy for people wanting to get into PC gaming, and would have near price parity against the initial cost of owning consolized gaming hardware.

• wumpus - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link

  You could easily hit the $600 price with an AMD 2 2400G. The catch is that it will draw twice as much power (expect a mobile edition sooner or later, but with an obvious performance hit). It also will only provide ~1030 levels of graphics (although I suspect that the "1050" may be a slower mobile setup, 65W for both GPU+CPU is extreme). It might even require an AMD "base design" as the first design will require real engineering to get the fan quiet enough for use while cooling 150W (+ everything else) and everybody will copy the first working design.
  
  The price only makes sense as long as the mining craze lasts. But it might still sell as long as it looks tolerable in a living room.

• JoeyJoJo123 - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link

  Yeah, I'm aware of the 2400G, but there's a knowledge and lack of self-confidence that acts as a barrier of entry for the general market when it comes to do-it-yourself PCs. (Even though they may not realize it's just adult legos when it comes to piecing together components, and sites like pcpartpicker make choosing compatible parts easy as pie.) Even the NUC, with the supply-your-own RAM and storage space is a barrier of entry to those same peoples.
  
  It'd be nice if the bottom of the barrel PC included specs similar to this for really low prices. It'd really open the market up to new people, even older generations that may just want a new, small, quiet PC for checking e-mail and pictures of family on FaceBook or something, when their PC is actually capably of sustainable performance on low-settings 1080p games.
  
  Even just a Gigabye BRIX formfactor PC with 2200G at a low price would be a great place to start.

• psychobriggsy - Tuesday, April 10, 2018 - link

  Since when was the 2400G 150W?

• sing_electric - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link

  HBM2 memory is expensive, but from what I understand, it looks like the Intel CPUs with Vega graphics are really priced as a high-end product. That sort of makes sense - Intel needs to price these as a step-up from an equivalent CPU without Vega, and AMD wants to make money, keeping in mind that every time Intel sells one of these, they might make a sale at Nvidia's expense, but they're also not selling a CPU.
  
  I spent about $600 in January and got a pre-built Ryzen 5 with a discrete RX 580. Its not perfect (and came with a spinning HDD, prompting an additional $200 for me to get a fast SSD), but I feel like it was a better value, since it's just a desktop tower, so I can upgrade as I see fit.

• MadHUN74 - Monday, April 9, 2018 - link

  will the thermals be better? same as the Intel NUC? I like the form factor of the NUC but worry about throttling.